Queer Constellations investigates the dreams and catastrophes of
recent urban history viewed through new queer narratives of
inner-city life. The “gay village,” “gay mecca,” “gai
Paris,” the “lesbian flaneur,” the “lesbian
bohème”—these and other urban phantasmagoria feature
paradoxically in this volume as figures of revolutionary utopia and
commodity spectacle, as fossilized archetypes of social
transformation and ruins of haunting cultural potential. Dianne
Chisholm introduces readers to new practices of walking, seeing,
citing, and remembering the city in works by Neil Bartlett, Samuel
R. Delany, Robert Glück, Alan Hollinghurst, Gary Indiana, Eileen
Myles, Sarah Schulman, Gail Scott, Edmund White, and David
Wojnarowicz. Reading these authors with reference to the history,
sociology, geography, and philosophy of space, particularly to the
everyday avant-garde production and practice of urban space,
Chisholm reveals how—and how effectively—queer narrative
documentary resembles and reassembles Walter Benjamin’s
constellations of Paris, “capital of the nineteenth century.”
Considering experimental queer writing in critical conjunction with
Benjamin’s city writing, the book shows how a queer perspective
on inner-city reality exposes contradictions otherwise obscured by
mythic narratives of progress. If Benjamin regards the Paris arcade
as a microcosm of high capitalism, wherein the (un)making of
industrial society is perceived retrospectively, in contemporary
queer narrative we see the sexually charged and commodity-entranced
space of the gay bathhouse as a microcosm of late capitalism and as
an exemplary site for excavating the contradictions of mass sex. In
Chisholm’s book we discover how, looking back on the ruins of
queer mecca, queer authors return to Benjamin to advance his
“dialectics of seeing”; how they cruise the paradoxes of market
capital, blasting a queer era out of the homogeneous course of
history.
General
Imprint: |
University of Minnesota Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
December 2004 |
Firstpublished: |
December 2004 |
Authors: |
Dianne Chisholm
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 149 x 20mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
376 |
Edition: |
New |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8166-4404-9 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-8166-4404-7 |
Barcode: |
9780816644049 |
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